• Lacking trucks and gear, a civil servant once destined for the priesthood now uses WhatsApp groups to direct volunteers who must manually carry river water through dense forest to tackle record blazes deep in an Amazonian town five times the size of New York City.
• Once rare, record-breaking wildfires destroyed millions of hectares across the Brazilian Amazon in recent years, leaving surviving forests increasingly fragile and susceptible to recurring blazes.
• Only 16% of Amazonian municipalities in Brazil have operational military fire brigades, forcing rural towns to rely on underfunded local offices and unpaid volunteers to defend the rainforest.

• European governments are pushing to delay and weaken the EU Deforestation Regulation, backing a one-year postponement to 2026 and major reductions in due-diligence requirements.
• The political shift is driven largely by Germany and supported by France, despite earlier European Commission rollbacks and opposition from only a few member states.
• Civil society groups warn that further delays would gut the law, punish early-compliant companies, and undermine the EU’s regulatory credibility.
• At COP30, the EU’s silence on deforestation has fueled accusations of hypocrisy as advocates say weakening the EUDR would have severe consequences for tropical forests.
• This story has been updated to include additional comments from Andi Muttaqien, executive director of Satya Bumi, on the implications of a potential EUDR delay for Indonesia.

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MOCOA, Colombia—This isn’t the first time foreigners have shown up here, where the Andes Mountains meet the Amazon rainforest, insisting they needed what was under the ground.

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Colombia was announced as the first Amazon country to declare its entire Amazon biome as a large-scale oil- and mining-free zone.

The announcement was made by Colombia’s Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development, Irene Vélez Torres during a meeting of ministers of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, OTCA.

“Colombia has decided to take the first step. We have been the first country in the Amazon basin to declare all of Colombia’s share of the Amazon biome as a reserve area of renewable natural resources, protecting this biome from large mining and hydrocarbon activities,” said Vélez Torres.

“We do this not only as an act of environmental sovereignty, but as a fraternal call to the other countries that share the Amazon biome, because the Amazon knows no borders and its care demands that we walk together,” he added.

The Colombian government encouraged the Amazon-intended nations to build an Amazon Alliance for Life to advance a just and sustainable energy transition.

The invitation was made during the Meeting of Ministers of Environment of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (OTCA), which was held at COP30 for climate change.

Colombia yearns for the Amazon rainforest to be the heart of climate action, environmental justice and peace with nature, shielding it from conventional extractive activities.

More than 483,000 square kilometers are included in the ban on new mining and hydrocarbon activities, which are equivalent to 42 percent of the continental and approximately 7 percent of the South American Amazon.

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• Northern Thailand is trapped in a cycle of air pollution driven by maize cultivation for the animal feed industry, with field burning each year choking the region in hazardous haze.
• Government crackdowns and “zero-burn” policies have failed because impoverished farmers see no viable alternative to burning amid falling yields and mounting debt.
• Deforestation, soil erosion and flooding linked to maize farming have devastated ecosystems and rural livelihoods across Chiang Mai province.
• Even as some communities ban maize cultivation to fight haze, new coal projects threaten to undo their gains, revealing Thailand’s conflicting approach to environmental governance.

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A new Greenpeace International report, Toxic Skies: How Agribusiness is Choking the Amazon, reveals how fires linked to industrial agriculture are turning the forest’s air toxic during the dry season. The findings are a stark warning that the Amazon’s crisis is not only about trees. It is about the air millions of people breathe, and the health of our shared planet.

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• New research carried out in Colombia by the University of Cambridge suggests that local surveys assessing the effect of land clearances on biodiversity may be underestimating the impact by as much as 60%.
• To fully understand the effects of clearing forests for pastureland, much surveys of a much larger scale are required to reflect the different levels of biodiversity in regions and habitats and their resilience to change.
• More accurate species surveys, the authors say, could also support future programs such as biodiversity offsetting schemes as well as influencing farming policies.

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• The Amazon’s “tipping point” refers to the transition of the rainforest into a drier, savanna ecosystem. The rainforest’s ecological balance depends on the transport and recycling of moisture, but deforestation has been shown to disrupt the region’s water cycle.
• Moisture moves east to west, from the Atlantic Ocean across the Amazon Basin via what scientists call “aerial” or “flying rivers,” a critical mechanism in the region’s water cycle.
• A new report from Amazon Conservation’s Monitoring of the Andes Amazon Project identified areas of deforestation that disrupt these flying rivers from hundreds of miles away. It also found that not all parts of the Amazon have the same tipping point.
• The researchers stressed the need for regional, transboundary conservation efforts that account for varied threats in different parts of the Amazon.

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The public has less than a week remaining to comment on the administration’s plans.

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Healthy forests are more than climate shields; in the Amazon, they also serve as public-health infrastructure.

A Communications Earth & Environment study spanning two decades across the biome links the extent and legal status of Indigenous Territories to 27 respiratory, cardiovascular, and zoonotic or vector-borne diseases. The findings are complex, but one pattern is clear: Where surrounding forest cover is high and fragmentation is low, Indigenous lands help blunt health risks.

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• Mongabay article
• research cited

To clarify, the benefits are due to large contiguous forest cover, which is a result of indigenous territories being legally protected from deforestation by outsiders. Any other protected area with intact forest cover (e.g. a national park or large private reserve) should provide the same benefits.

A Meadowview, Virginia, research center spearheads the effort, and more than a dozen experimental, large-plot plantings on state public lands have not only survived but reached maturity. Lesesne State Forest in Nelson County, for instance, holds about thirty acres of natural, second-growth woods anchored by seventy-foot-tall American chestnut trees that are more than sixty years old—and produce delicious wild nuts that few living people beyond foresters and researchers have ever tasted.

“We don’t go out of our way to advertise this fact,” says Scrivani, “but the public can now hike in and walk through natural groves of healthy [American chestnut trees] and forage for nuts for the first time in nearly a century.”

• The bicolored waterberry (Syzygium guineense subsp. barotsense) is a dominant tree along the Kafue and other major Zambian rivers, where it plays a vital structural and ecological role.
• Though capable of self-pollination, the tree’s flowers attract bees, birds and moths, creating vibrant micro-ecosystems in its canopy.
• While not currently threatened, riparian clearing poses local risks, and the trees’ value to pollinators may offer a path to conservation.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/41960022

Plectranthus barbatus grows to its full height in 1-2 months from a cutting and the cutting itself costs around 50 Kenyan shillings ($0.37).

"The leaves are similar in size to an industrial toilet paper square, making them suitable for use in modern flush toilets or for composting in latrines," says Odhiambo.

They emit a minty, lemony fragrance. Covered in tiny hairs, the leaves have a soft texture.

• The involvement of Munduruku people in illegal mining inside the Munduruku Indigenous Territory made Brazil’s efforts to stop it more complicated, federal officials said.
• Munduruku sources told Mongabay that deception, abandonment by the state and a lack of alternative income sources are what push some Munduruku people to mine.
• The recruitment of Indigenous peoples is an important mechanism used by miners to secure access to lands and gain support against government crackdowns, researchers said.
• Sources said the government should invest in public policies and alternative income projects to strengthen food security, improve health and the sustainable development of communities.

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20588292

• As REDD projects around the world face setbacks, restoration projects in the Amazon are flourishing as a means of reviving market confidence in forest-based carbon credits.
• In Brazil, the golden goose for restoration, this business model has attracted companies from the mining and beef industries, banks, startups, and big tech.
• Federal and state governments are granting public lands to restoration companies to recover degraded areas.
• Restoration projects require substantial investments and long-term commitment, face challenges such as increasingly severe fire seasons, and deal with uncertainty over the future of the carbon market.

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20554167

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...one thousand trucks poured into the national park, offloading over 12,000 metric tons of sticky, mealy, orange compost onto the worn-out plot. The site was left untouched and largely unexamined for over a decade. A sign was placed to ensure future researchers could locate and study it.

16 years later, Janzen dispatched graduate student Timothy Treuer to look for the site where the food waste was dumped.

Treuer initially set out to locate the large placard that marked the plot — and failed.

Compost your fruit scraps! (Or just throw them on the neighbour's pasture land.)

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20552909

The fruit is edible, but there's not much food on it, so probably not worth planting outside of its native range.

Thorn forest once blanketed the Rio Grande Valley. Restoring even a little of it could help the region cope with the impacts of climate change

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20488683

BR-319: Paving the way for Indigenous displacement and environmental catastrophe.

more about peatlands:

• Only 17% of peatlands, vital to curbing climate change, are protected, study finds
• Protecting peatlands and mangroves could halve Southeast Asia’s land-use emissions
• Peru’s rare peatland swamps at risk as gold mining expands
• Congo Peatlands - the largest and most intact across the world's tropics

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/35583702

Whether the move will boost lumber supplies as Trump envisioned in an executive order last month remains to be seen. Former President Joe Biden’s administration also sought more logging in public forests to combat fires, which are worsening as the world gets hotter, yet U.S. Forest Service timber sales stayed relatively flat under his tenure.

It exempts affected forests from an objection process that allows outside groups, tribes and local governments to challenge logging proposals at the administrative level before they are finalized. It also narrows the number of alternatives federal officials can consider when weighing logging projects.

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Update 2025: https://slrpnk.net/post/20382724

As Mongabay reported, researchers have found 3.5 million km (2.2 million mi) of roads in the nine Brazilian states encompassing the Legal Amazon. They estimated that at least 86% of these roads are used by loggers, gold miners and unauthorized settlers — branching off from official roads. Studies have also found that 95% of deforestation happens within 5.5 km (3.4 mi) of a road and 85% of fires each year occur within 5 km (3.1 mi).